Microsoft takes a look at this Sunday’s Super Bowl through search traffic

Microsoft has partnered with the NFL -- anyone who watched the Sunday games this season likely knew this, as the ads were all over the place. Heck Surface was even named the official tablet of the league, with teams now using it in all sorts of ways.

Today the company is using its Bing search engine to unveil some stats about the upcoming showdown between the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks. The latter is a team that Microsoft has not been shy about backing, given it is the local franchise for the folks at headquarters.

Microsoft produced a map of the US, defining search traffic for each team by location. It’s a rather interesting breakdown, showing a wide variation across the country, though with some rather expected geographical influence.

For starting quarterbacks, Peyton Manning had a large margin of victory, taking 72-percent of the search traffic. This still fell short of the 81-percent generated by Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, though that was due in large part to his interesting post-game interview with Erin Andrews following his team’s victory over the San Francisco 49ers (if you haven’t watched it then do).

None of this predicts which team will emerge victorious, but it does lend some interesting statistics to this week of build-up before kickoff takes place on Sunday.